Hello world!

I’m bookish, I’m Desi, and, as of this past August, I am newly enrolled in Library School for my MLIS degree. (Very appropriate for a bookish person like me, I’m sure you agree, once you learn of my voracious reading habit!) But, as I have learned over the past couple of years from my on-line librarian friend and mentor Joy Weese Moll, these days librarianship is about much MUCH more than books. Technology, the Internet, on-line searching, databases, social networking–all these have become an essential part of libraries quite rapidly and this is part of my huge draw to the field. I relish using technology to find information, and I love the idea of helping others to do the same!

Well then, you might ask… Why call myself Bookish Desi, why not Tech-ish Desi? Good question. Perhaps it is because, like many other would-be librarians, the thing that first drew me to libraries as a child was the love of books books and more BOOKS. Childhood trips to the public library with my mother were the source of hours of fun and thirsty knowledge seeking–all from books. And books are still in many ways the essence of libraries. In my Fundamentals of Library Science class, one student who currently works in the children’s department of the library told an anecdote that illustrates this well: The children who frequent her library after school usually head straight for the computers for MySpace, email and more, right? (Surprise, surprise.) Well, one day there was an outage and all the kids started asking for help to find books that they would like, much to her surprise and pleasure…

And so, even though the library today is much more than just the sum total of books, I am proud to be known as Bookish Desi. In this blog I aim to gather resources for myself and other interested, curious library aficionados and library students. The topics (I hope) will be varied–kind of like when you’re doing research in a library, but you start browsing, and find all kinds of interesting treasures! I also look forward to your comments and suggestions to help my blog grow.